The Colombian Nightmare

Narco-trafficking Has Brought Colombia Escalating Terror And Violence. It Brought Francisco Santos The Agonies Of Kidnapping And Exile.

July 16, 2000|By Francisco Santos. Francisco Santos is an editor of El Tiempo, the leading newspaper of Bogota, Colombia, and a prominent activist against the violence engulfing his nation.

Hundreds of thousands of families displaced. Tens of thousands of citizens kidnapped. Thousands of businessmen and their families fleeing the country because of the danger. Dozens of intellectuals assassinated or threatened. Dozens of human-rights activists dead and disappeared. Hundreds of journalists exiled, kidnapped and murdered.

The internal armed conflict that Colombia is living through today destroys the country and its future. Citizens from all social classes feel in their own flesh the pain of war.

I have not been spared from this grim panorama. Twice in the past decade I have been a victim of the violence unleashed by a war and the drug trafficking that finances it. In 1990, Pablo Escobar, the capo of the Medellin cartel, kidnapped me for eight months. And only four months ago, on March 10, I had to flee into exile when organized criminals who work with the Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces (or FARC, its Spanish acronym) in the business of kidnapping tried to assassinate me on the outskirts of Bogota, the capital of my country.

In 1980, Colombia had only 50 kidnappings. Murders numbered fewer than 5,000 per year. Paramilitary forcesdid not exist. And membership in the six guerrilla groups that were active then totaled less than 10,000 men. So what happened in Colombia? Why in only 20 years has the violence in general and in the guerrilla struggle in particular reached today's levels? How does one explain that in only one generation the murder toll has climbed to 23,000 a year and abductions to more than 3,000 a year? There is only one answer: drugs.

In the mid-1970s, when the Colombian government militarized the fight against marijuana with the support of the Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter administrations, drug traffickers found a product more profitable and easier to transport and distribute--coca.

Since then the drug cartels in Peru, Bolivia and Colombia have funneled their human, financial and military resources into the cultivation, processing, transport and distribution of that narcotic. At the outset, the coca was cultivated and processed in Peru and Bolivia, while in Colombia it was refined as cocaine and transported to centers of consumption.

However, the successful campaign to prevent and substitute the cultivation of coca crops in Peru and Bolivia led to the vertical integration of this "industry" in Colombia. Today my country is the epicenter of this immense, multinational, illegal business whose consumer markets lie in the United States and Europe.

Obviously the transfer of such a flux of capital brought with it the ills that plague Colombia: endemic violence, a well-funded guerrilla force with a mighty capacity to destabilize, and vast social and political corruption. Further complicating the crisis, the political and economic elites have been incapable of finding realistic solutions to these national problems.

My life as a journalist has been interwoven with this national reality. On September 19, 1990, the now-deceased drug trafficker Pablo Escobar abducted several journalists--me for eight months--and murdered my chauffeur. During this period, Escobar used coercion through narco-terrorism, corruption and abductions to get the Constituent Assembly to establish articles in the new constitution that prohibited the extradition of Colombians.

For 234 days I was chained to a bed in a dark room. Every night and every morning, when I lay down or went to sleep, I thought those would be the last hours of my life. Every second of survival was a second that I had snatched away from death. I learned first-hand about the Darwinian ability of human beings to adapt to the most difficult circumstances.

But the pain of being kidnapped, like a wound in the heart that never heals, doesn't only hurt the person who was kidnapped. The family of the victim suffers even more. The uncertainty of loved ones over the fate of the person suddenly stolen from them is worse than the kidnapping itself. The hours seem like days. The days are an eternity.

For family members, to eat a good breakfast or to enjoy a sunny day generates an immense feeling of guilt. The soul dies, little by little, with each second that passes. My father aged 20 years during my eight months of captivity.

In this crime, even the criminals themselves suffer. They too are kidnapped, because they have a mission to accomplish. In my case, primarily four men took daily shifts of six hours each taking care of me. "This is like a funeral without death," one of them told me, in a most accurate description of an abduction.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, a winner of the Nobel Prize in literature, related in his book "Notice of a Kidnapping" how Escobar demonstrated his capacity to intimidate Colombian society while the state proved unable to protect its citizens. After Escobar's death, his organized bands of paid assassins and kidnappers planted, like a cancer, the seeds of assassination and abduction that made Colombia one of the most violent countries in the world.